Business Analytics involves several steps to translate boring data into helping the stakeholders in making crucial decisions related to their business. The question is that how Data Analysts can help the relevant stakeholders in helping them make these critical decisions?
The answer is – Intuitive Dashboards.
Let’s take an example to illustrate this point.
Let’s say you are a Sales Manager in a pharmaceutical firm in England. You need to make critical decision. One way to accomplish the related tasks is by going through hundreds and thousands of quantitative and qualitative data almost every day, which seems to be a very tiring job for any professional in almost every domain.
The other intuitive method is by Excel Dashboards!
Creating powerful and impactful dashboards is a key part of an analyst’s role and trust me, senior executives love a well-made dashboard.
Now most of your may be wondering as to why an excel dashboard is sufficient when there are numerous Business Analytical tools available in the market?
The answer to the question is simple: Cost and usability to the novice users.
If we consider Tableau and Power BI, which are the leader when it comes to Data Analytics and Visualization, the cost that it brings is very high. Even the cheapest subscription of these tools costs thousands of Dollars, which the startups might have a hard time in bearing the cost of it. Other than that, in comparison to usability experience of the targeted audience of Microsoft Excel, the new analytical tools require some form of trainings to have a full grasp of using the software. So, these trainings will again bring some amount of cost along with it which these startups might not be able to bear it.
In this article, we will be discussing five powerful Excel dashboard templates for different domains.
What is a Dashboard?
A Dashboard provides a high-level overview of your business. It usually comprises of various charts, tables, and visualizations that are pleasing to the eye and easy to interpret. The design and contents of the dashboards are pre-decided and are always available at the click of a button, which helps in the process of quick decision making. These dashboards are usually handy to perform drilldowns.
For example, as a sales manager – let’s say you want to view your country sales. You find that sales in one state account for 80% of your total business! Now you may want to analyze even further by going deeper into city-level sales in the dashboard.
Now that we have a handle on what dashboards are, let’s dive into the different types of dashboards we can design in Excel!
Tracking Online Sales via Dashboard
Covid19’s pandemic era has forced various changes in how we live, interact and most importantly, even do business. Previously, people preferred opening their shops and branches to sell their products. However, due to the lockdown, business around the world have adopted to this change and have started to do business online. If you are selling things online or even if you have a small business, then this dashboard by Microsoft will help you make crucial decisions!
It keeps you up to date with the various aspects of your business by providing a clean and intuitive way of analyzing relevant metrices and dimensions pertaining to your business. If you are just beginning your journey in Excel dashboarding, I would recommend you start with this dashboard template.
Market Analytics
Whether you consider a startup or a large company whose assets equals multi-million dollars, Marketing department plays a key role in deciding the path which company should take for generating more profits and stability. For the Marketers to be fully informed and confident of their strategies, they need a Dashboard to having a snapshot of where the company stands at any moment in time.
Lead generation is a crucial process for businesses all around the globe. A lead is any person who shows interest in your product or service. This lead can express its intent in many forms, such as putting your product in the cart (E-commerce), contacting you directly, or through any other marketing channels. You can provide more information about your products and services to the lead so that they can potentially become your future customer.
Project Management
Every organization needs a software to keep track of the project that they are working on. Excel can easily create a Dashboard which gives an insight to the relevant higher management the progress and stage the project is in.
The dashboard keeps tracks of your tasks, timelines, and budgets by incorporating multiple visualizations such as Gantt charts, overall task status, budget, and pending items. It helps you streamline your project, keeping your project on schedule without overdoing your budget.
Operational Revenue
It is imperative for a company, small or big, to be informed well enough of the expenses and revenues from an operational perspective. Although this dashboard is a little bit advanced than the ones described earlier, however it gives a boost to your abilities and being called a skilled Data Analyst within your organization.
Human Resource
The Human Resource dashboard is an interesting one for everyone to take cue to from. It not only enables the user to filter the metrices via a simple department’s dropdown, but also gives a clear picture of open positions, employee scores, promotions and average salaries within a department in a concise way.
Since the world is during a pandemic right now, a lot of companies are opting for work from home culture. According to you, what should be the metrics that must be captured for making HR dashboards in the post-pandemic world? Let me know in the comments!
Conclusion
In this article, I presented some of the Dashboards pertaining to different departments within an organization to prove that Data Analytics is applicable to almost every organization and it’s departments which generates either structured or unstructured data.
The only hurdle is that how much creative and analytics skills a Data Analyst will be able to use for creation of these beautiful and provocative Dashboard for beneficial of the organization.
